Budget-Aware User Satisfaction Maximization on Service Provisioning in Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) promises to provide mobile users with delay-sensitive services at the edge of network, and each user service request usually is associated with a Service Function Chain (SFC) requirement that consists of Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) in order. The satisfaction of a user on his requested service is heavily impacted by the service reliability. In this article, we study user satisfaction on services provided by an MEC network through introducing a submodular function based metric to measure user satisfaction. We first formulate a novel user satisfaction problem with the aim to maximize the accumulative user satisfaction, assuming that all available computing resource in the MEC network can be used for service reliability enhancement. We show that the problem is NP-hard, and devise an approximation algorithm with a provable approximation ratio for it. We then consider the problem under a given computing resource budget constraint, for which we devise an approximation algorithm with a provable approximation ratio, at the expense of moderate budget violations. We finally evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms through experimental simulations. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms outperform the comparison baseline algorithms, improving the performance by more 16.1% in comparison with the baseline algorithms.